


Delayed Reaction

by lferion



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Angst, Cats, Classic Who, Gen, Missing Scene, Virgin New Adventures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1996-08-08
Updated: 2008-10-08
Packaged: 2017-10-02 01:54:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/pseuds/lferion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the main events of <span class="u">God-Engine</span> the Doctor has trouble re-connecting with the Tardis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Delayed Reaction

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Seventh Doctor story, and comes right between the last two chapters of Craig Hinton's New Adventure GodEngine. I made no effort at all to match Craig's writing style - indeed I suspect that the style is mostly owed to Kate Orman, Paul Cornell and Rebecca Anderson, with a little Dorothy Dunnett thrown in.
> 
> Various things that happen in GodEngine are referred to in the story, most notably the destruction of the TARDIS, which happens immediately before the book opens. The situation is resolved, but during the course of the book, hints are given as to some of the possible personal consequences this disaster has for the Doctor. These glimpses are seen through Roz' eyes. The book gives no explicit resolution to this aspect of the situation. That, combined with Wolsey the cat's absence from the rest of the book and the Doctor's stated intention to find him resulted in this story.
> 
> Footnotes at the end.
> 
> Completed 8/8/1996. Originally published in the charity zine "The Cat Who Walked Through Time"

Alone.

He was looking for Wolsey, but the secondary console room had found him instead. Brass and dark, rich wood, jewel-coloured lights and switches. He'd not been here for some time; he didn't remember the plump sofa in the corner, which, though it looked cat-comfortable, was presently unoccupied. Empty. He drew a small breath and let it out softly, not quite a sigh. Alone in the room. Even the ever-present subliminal hum of the TARDIS was muted, hard to find. He kept loosing the thread of it.

**The sourceless light strengthened, warmed.**

Of course, it was only to be expected that Wolsey would be hard to find. He was, after all, a cat. And cats don't like disruption, much less ruptures! of their homes, scattering their belongings, hiding the food-dish, leaving them isolate, alone.

Lonely.

_He_ was lonely. Trillions of stars, countless numbers of planets, a universe teeming with life, an infinity of days and hours, minutes, moments to visit, to watch, mark, rejoice at, to make a difference with, and yet.... Outside, looking in: none of it was his. "Not _my_ Earth!" In the midst of all that myriad of life, of possibility, of 'company', he was alone.

Looking for Wolsey. Trying to keep hold of an invisible possibility-string with strengthless mental fingers.

The light in the wood-paneled room was full up now. Absently, he looked in all the console cupboards. Full of odd things, empty of cats.

Oh, Chris and Roz were about, distant, back with the main console. Close yet far, and needing to deal, no doubt, with the weight of knowing, of having to accommodate the cruelty of webs that would only flex so far. Unfortunate. Necessary. Possibly dimming the brightness of the sparks, the candles enthusiastically, stoically, burning at both ends. Anchored to an intangible, attenuated, mutually agreed upon 'present'. Not used to looking into the well. Possibly to choose to look no longer. A sigh. A rueful grimace.

He missed Benny. Who had looked, who knew, a little, and understood perhaps too much. And wasn't here, now, 'at present'. He breathed in sharply, bone and skin, muscles remembering. Arm in arm, leading him back into the warmth, the light. *Her* party. Her choice. Her presence. Not alone: pick up and carry on.

Not here. The string slipped.

White linen dragged at his shoulders, the jacket seeming large on a too-small frame. With no one to watch, did it matter what he looked like? Dangerous ground, that. And there _was_ still the TARDIS, Verity, the Ship. Though of course she truly did not care what he looked like. Outside. And he couldn't seem to locate any mirrors inside.

Tentative, he traced a delicate line along the edge of the console. Turn the corner. Think of something else. Chris and Roz had done very well on Mars, inventive, intelligent, observant. Caring. Dayflies, mayflies, butterflies. Anchorpoints against chaos in a personal time-vortex. Pinning up the rips. Roz had seen the TARDIS-ghosts, not him. Perhaps ghosts can't see other ghosts, only in philosophy. He wondered, briefly, what she had seen when she looked at him. Really, it didn't bear thinking about. But all his thoughts were spiral, tugging toward an irresistible, unbearable eye. All alone.

Again, trembling, his fingers traced patterns on the console. Referential differencer, time-path indicator, scanner vertical hold. He'd had to remind his hearts to beat, his lungs to breathe. White-out. Snapped to single-focus. Absolute present. No bargain, no delay, just one unspeakable, unthinkable chance. One throw. One re-write, writhing on the tree, poison falling in the well, the _wrong_ lightning bolt. Residual effect transfixed between the image and the actual. To act takes time. Never allow the nightmare substance: the implacable void _will_ look back. His head was ringing, whitely, in the silence.

"He never returns my phone calls."

"And I never answer letters, either," he murmured distractedly.

No getting off this train of thought. The only other station was truly the end of the line. The breath ached in his lungs, hearts laboring, clever hands clenched desperately on impossible brass angles. His eyes were wide and blind, searching in invisible places for something he could not, now, see. Hang on over the changing points - the vibration might jog an inspiration loose. And the loss didn't bear thinking about; nothing real is ever forgotten. Curse and blessing, kill and cure. He would find the balance point. He would find the cat, even. Embrace the paradox: even though the knife is as if it had never been, the wound is real.

Flashpoint. Flashback.

You know very well, Doctor, that the only way out is through.

His very cells had screamed at the TARDIS' destruction. Ripped awareness, a tearing, a vast, bloody excision at the heart of who he was. It had been all he could do to keep body and mind together in the face of a wound far deeper and more unreasonable  
than even that at Huitzilin's hand, Ace's knife.

Alone.

Absolutely alone.

The light, the lightness was intolerable.

His lungs were struggling now, shuddering in quick, shallow gasps, The tenuous, inverted embrace of the console all that held him up.

**Cool white light surrounding him, waiting, watching.**

Pull yourself together, now. She'd managed to, with a little help from her friends.

Really, he shouldn't be trying to deal with this by himself. Not alone. There were simple, rational, biochemical and neurophysiological explanations for all of this, as he had tried to explain to Nyssa the last time the searching light had failed to hold him up, and the dizzy depths of Earth had cradled something broken in more than bone. Too damaged to tolerate even _her_ touch.

The mind writes deeply in the body; but re-writes were his stock-in-trade.

No.

This was not a page to edit.

Endure. Heal the disconnection.

Give the glassy shards the space to reassemble. Don't ask if Alice isn't home. But how to find the looking-glass country without a reflection? His mirrors were all busy keeping their own ghosts at bay.

Once upon a time it wouldn't even have been an issue. Close, but not _that_ close, only friends, clear lines, simple divisions. Once upon a time she'd only been the ship, not... Before that drop, before Fenric, before a lot of things. Now there were cracks in his wineglass, and sometimes the impossible brightness leaked through.

Now....

Come on Professor, say it,

Now, he'd come to the conclusion that she was the silver on his mirror, and...

Say it!

And now he rather thought he couldn't live without her, and how fortunate then, that he didn't have to try, but he wasn't terribly sure, either, that he was going to be able to, to, ....

i cant, i wont finish that thought. No.

Alone in memory.

All alone. Powerless, friendless, betrayed and alone. Lonely. Alone.

The white void was winning. More than he could cope with. Which was perfectly ridiculous. He'd _won_ hadn't he? The cosmic unthinkable hadn't happened. Had been avoided. Made null. Earth was safe (well, insofar as that word applied under the current historical circumstances!) He had made it not happen. He and Roz and Chris and Rachel and the Abbot and all the kings horses and all the kings men (and the sword of Tuburr) had put Humpty Dumpty together again....

It appeared that the price of that victory was being called in now. Too many splints and patches. Reliance on vaporware. Not enough reserve. Not enough time. Lost thread. Cut strings. No connection. No carrier.

Now he recognized the white dazzle as the tiresome precursor of unconsciousness, and he struggled to hold it off. He didn't have a mirror to keep the nightmares at bay. He couldn't seem to catch his breath. He couldn't feel his feet. Numb hands slipped from the edge railing, and gracelessly graceful, he slid to the floor.

There was a blue-green catseye shooter wedged in a crack at the base of the console. It appeared to be looking at him.

Well, at least I haven't lost my marbles this time, he thought a little desperately. Just my balance, way, reflection, train of thought, peace of mind, breath and cat. Wolsey. I was looking for Wolsey.

He'd _been_ looking for Wolsey. And something else. Now the floor had found him. He lay half curled on one side, not quite unconscious.

"I did find the TARDIS," he whispered faintly, "and I do still expect to find Wolsey. Or perhaps he'll find me, though it is terribly disorienting to navigate in here when you can't hear the carrier wave."

The marble made no reply, but then, he hadn't expected it to. He was alone.

He couldn't feel the faint vibration of the floor, the susurration in the air that was the TARDIS' heartsbeat. He'd lost her, blotted out by the white void. No sense, nonsense, lost perspective, lost chord, lost soul...

Lonely alone.

Whiteout.

**And the searching light tried to thicken around him like a blanket.**

 

But no, his eyes were full of orange marmalade, and someone was sandpapering his thumb while dusting his nose, which was about to make him sneeze. He did sneeze, and it hurt rather, as if he had been forgetting to breathe, and had stalled the system, but the coffee-grinder which chose that moment to go into high gear in the immediate vicinity of his lungs shook away the constriction and the ache both. Surely coffee-grinders didn't usually come equipped with pneumatic pistons?

Oh. Of course they didn't. Cats did. Wolsey. Not alone.

Wolsey's purr exactly matched the fundamental harmonics of the TARDIS. Connection re-established by peer.

The void retreated and dissolved to memory, personal past.

He thought, and the TARDIS and Wolsey concurred, that he might sleep now, and the couch was a far more comfortable place than the floor.

And so it was that when Roz happened by later, peeking in through the open door to a room lit dimly as if by a favourite night-light, she found the Doctor peacefully asleep, the harsh lines of strain eased and smoothed from his face by a tiny smile, his small frame comfortably relaxed against the plush cushions, relieved now of a burden she had been afraid was too heavy even for him. Wolsey lay curled luxuriously on his chest, head tucked against the Time Lord's collarbone, purring. Found. Good. That was everyone accounted for. She wouldn't disturb him then.

As she left, she could have sworn she saw the cat wink. Guarding his dreams.

Right.


	2. Footnotes and references

NOTES:

Specific references to _GodEngine_

Roz sees several ghostly images of the TARDIS floating about before she mentions them to the Doctor, and before he sees one himself. It is clear that he is having a very bad time of it, and Roz worries at how unlike his usual self he is.

At the end of the story, the Doctor shows Chris and Roz how the "web of time" has accommodated to the changes that happened because of them. It is not happy news, thus the paragraph about them being in the main console room. Enthusiastically refers to Chris, stoically refers to Roz.

The TARDIS is destroyed by being caught between a 'subspace infarction' and a 'vortex rupture', as in the Time Vortex. Both vortex and rupture are loaded words, and anything which might be interpreted to refer to a vortex (ie spiral) probably does.

"It's not _my_ Earth" is meant to be a quote from the one of the confrontations in the book, said by the Doctor. I need to check again to make sure I have the exact wording.

Other specific references  
[NA's - New Adventures novels, _Book Titles_, "Aired Episodes"]

Loosing the thread, invisible possibility-string - a combined reference to George MacDonald's _The Princess and the Goblin_ and mathematical string theory.

The secondary console room is first seen in "The Masque of Mandragora" and has reappeared in the NA's on occasion. There are flip-down doors on the console itself.

He missed Benny - this is a reference to the immediately previous book, _Happy Endings_ by Paul Cornell.

Pick up and carry on - a half-line from my poem Human Nature II, inspired by Paul Cornell's _Human Nature_. The whole line is: How not forget, endure, withstand, pick up and carry on.

White linen - at this point in the NA's the Doctor is wearing an outfit that includes a slightly baggy white linen jacket. In the novelization of "Castrovalva" one of the apparent effects of the regeneration crisis is that he sort of shrinks inside his clothes and loses substance. This paragraph also has a reference to _Human Nature_ (Verity) and the first season Hartnell stories (the Ship). There is also a distance reference to _The Also People_.

Mirrors - mirror is another loaded word, and contains reference to "Castrovalva", _The Also People_, _Through the Looking Glass_ and my poem 'Magical Thinking', _Sleepy_. And no doubt other things.

Dayflies - this is a Dunnett reference "time spent with [an impetuous teenager] would make a dayfly feel like Enoch" from _The Game of Kings_.

Butterflies - a weighted word in NA usage. One of Time's (the eternal or god) symbols, also invokes the idea of the tiny things can result in major consequences concept, and the base idea of a pretty, useful and fragile life.

Only in philosophy - a quote from "Castrovalva". There is a whole lot of that episode underpinning this story. The whole exchange is -- Dr: "Can you see it [the recursive nature of the town]?" Shardovan: "Not with my eyes, but in my philosophy."

No bargain, no delay - I think this is Shakespeare, but I'm not sure.

Chance ... lightning-bolt - another complex reference, primarily to _Timewyrm: Revelation_ by Paul Cornell, and my poem inspired by the same.

Nightmare ... void - Neitzche, _Left Handed Hummingbird_, etc.

Phonecalls - _Human Nature_

Letters - "Ghostlight"

Nothing is ever forgotten - Robin of Sherwood

Kill and cure - _The Crystal Bucephalus_, _Left Handed Hummingbird_

Huitzilin's hand, Ace's knife - _Left Handed Hummingbird_, _No Future_, _Set Piece_.

With a little help... - The Beatles

As he had tried to explain... - "Logopolis" and "Castrovalva". Several of the phrases in this paragraph come from a poem I wrote called Shadowmage Fugue.

The mind writes deeply - _The Forbidden Tower_ by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Heal the disconnection - "Castrovalva" again.

Glassy shards ... at bay - see mirrors above.

Professor - This is something Ace would say.

i cant ... - a sideways reference to 'oh i remember now' from Left Handed Hummingbird.

Powerless friendless betrayed and alone - _Original Sin_, this was the name of one of the characters.

Humpty Dumpty - the broken egg being the TARDIS.

Splints and patches - Dunnett, _Game of Kings_ I think.

No Carrier - yes, the message you get from your modem when the connection breaks.

Lost marbles - _Set Piece_, _Sleepy_.

Orange marmalade ... pistons - Rebecca Anderson's Synaesthesia trilogy gave me the perspective for this paragraph.

Connection ... peer - an intentional inversion of that hideously annoying computer message 'connection reset by peer' meaning you've lost your server (or whatever) connection in a particularly ungraceful and unfriendly way.

Guarding his dreams - dreams, particularly the Doctor's dreams, are another weighted and complex concept in the NA's. A subject much too big for a note.

Major sources - Episodes: Castrovalva, Logopolis, Ghostlight, Kinda.   
New Adventures: Paul Cornell, Kate Orman, Craig Hinton, Ben Aaronovitch


End file.
